by John Guy
And her imprisonment dragged on. Beale was sent back to Sheffield, where Mary again proposed a deal in which she and James would share the throne. They would recognize Elizabeth as queen of England for as long as she lived, while reserving their own dynastic claim to the succession. It was hardly a new idea. But Elizabeth was willing to consider it. She even sent Walsingham, very much against his will, on an embassy to Scotland to float the plan.
This was shortly after he had pulled off his most significant intelligence coup by recruiting a mole at the French embassy. He was Laurent Feron, one of Castelnau’s clerks. As Feron had good reason to visit Walsingham in the normal course of his duties, it was easy to slip him secret documents over and above the papers he was really meant to show him. Walsingham was watching the embassy closely, because a young and headstrong Catholic gentleman, Francis Throckmorton (a nephew of Sir Nicholas, a staunch Protestant, who had died in 1571), who had also traveled to Madrid and Paris, was observed making regular visits. He was arrested in November 1583, when he confessed under gruesome torture that the Duke of Guise was preparing to invade England and Scotland with Spanish and papal support, and that Mendoza was the impresario of the plot.
In January 1584, Mendoza was summoned before the Privy Council and expelled from England. He left in a rage, shutting the door of the Spanish embassy in London for the rest of Elizabeth’s reign. Mary now relied exclusively on Castelnau to get her encoded letters and instructions delivered to her agents in Paris. This is where Walsingham’s mole came in. Whatever she sent or received through the embassy could be copied and sent to Walsingham. Not much of the evidence against Throckmorton could be used against her, because if it were, the mole’s cover would be blown and Walsingham could not continue reading her secret correspondence. A trap was nevertheless baited.
Mary was naive about the danger she faced. After so many long years of imprisonment, she had come to occupy an enclosed mental space in which her sense of reality was ebbing away and intrigue became a substitute for activity. She worried about security measures even as she risked her own security. “The best recipe for secret ink,” she informed Castelnau (as if he did not already know), “is alum dissolved in a little clear water twenty-four hours before it is required to write with. In order to read it, the paper must be dipped in a basin of water, and then held to the fire; the secret writing then appears white, and may easily be read until the paper dries.” Naturally, the mole sent a copy of this letter straight to a much-amused Walsingham, in whose papers it remains.
But Mary was soon undeceived. After a mysterious silence lasting six weeks, she wrote, “Through the discovery of all my agents who have visited your house, many people greatly suspect that one of your servants has been ‘turned,’ which to speak the truth, I rather think myself.”
Fortunately for Walsingham, Castelnau did not smell a mole. He carried on business as usual, enabling the spymaster to keep on reading his letters. They showed that Mary had indeed encouraged Throckmorton and promised to reward him. She had urged Castelnau to do all he could to assist him, which was enough to prove that she was dabbling in conspiracy while she was negotiating with Elizabeth to be restored as coruler in Scotland. Elizabeth’s fury at this deception ended all further prospects of a political accord with Mary. From this point on, there was no more talk of a rapprochement.
Then, in July 1584, a catastrophe occurred. William of Orange, the leader of the Dutch Protestants in their revolt against Philip II, fell victim to a Catholic assassin’s bullet. The shockwaves reverberated across Europe. This, and a series of assassination plots against Elizabeth, created a frenzy in which the Catholics and their allies were portrayed as terrorists by the Protestants.
In October, Cecil and Walsingham drew up the Bond of Association. It was modeled on Scottish and Huguenot examples, extended to include the whole of the Protestant elite and others who wished to subscribe to it. At its core was the notion of Protestant citizenship. Signatories were to comprise “one firm and loyal society . . . by the majesty of Almighty God.” They were to take a solemn oath by which they entered into a national covenant to defend Elizabeth’s life and the Protestant succession.
The bond was not just an oath of loyalty. It was a license to kill. Signatories swore to “pursue as well by force of arms as by all other means of revenge” anyone who tried to harm Elizabeth. Retribution was to be exacted on the spot. Moreover, no “pretended successor by whom or for whom any such detestable act shall be attempted or committed” was to be spared (italics added). This clause was the most arbitrary. It included the heirs and successors of the intended beneficiary. Thus if anyone threatened Elizabeth’s life in the interest of the Stuart succession, both Mary and James VI would be executed, whether privy to the attempt or not.
Parliament met in November to discuss the Bond of Association. What followed was a protracted battle of wills. Elizabeth was fifty-one. Her father, Henry VIII, had died at fifty-five, and her sister, Mary Tudor, at forty-two. Quite apart from the threat of assassination and the looming war with Spain, Cecil was keen to settle the vexed question of the succession once and for all. He wanted to create a radical constitutional mechanism that would automatically exclude Mary and enable a Protestant ruler to be selected by Parliament when Elizabeth died. And Elizabeth was determined to prevent him.
Cecil proposed a Great or Grand Council that would come into effect on the queen’s death, governing as a council of regency and summoning a Parliament that would choose a Protestant successor, whose authority would be confirmed by a statute. It was a quasi-republican solution to the succession issue, one that guaranteed Mary’s exclusion, since Catholics were ineligible to sit in Parliament after the legislation of 1571. But it was a risky proposition, and in Elizabeth’s view an almost scandalous subversion of the principles of monarchy and hereditary right.
She wielded her power and instructed Cecil to drop his plans for the succession. The Act for the Queen’s Safety, as it was passed in March 1585, dealt instead with two contingencies, each devised with Mary in mind and paving the way for her trial and execution. The first concerned a claimant to the throne (i.e., Mary) who was involved in an invasion, a rebellion or a plot. In such a case, a commission of privy councilors and other lords of Parliament, assisted by judges, would hear the evidence and promulgate its verdict by royal proclamation. Those found guilty were to be excluded from the succession, and all subjects “by virtue of this act and Her Majesty’s direction in that behalf” might exact their revenge by killing them.
The act then considered Elizabeth’s assassination. In such a case, the commissioners would investigate and proclaim their sentence as before, whereupon the intended beneficiary (i.e., Mary) was to be proscribed, and she and her accomplices would be hunted down and killed according to the Bond of Association.
But if the Act for the Queen’s Safety confirmed the bond as it related to Mary, its most draconian sanctions were moderated. Whereas the bond made no provision for a public trial, the act insisted that offenders be tried by a commission. And whereas the bond had referred to heirs and successors (i.e., James VI). Elizabeth exempted James unless he was “assenting or privy” to a plot. This was not mere altruism. She was about to send an expeditionary force under Leicester’s command to aid the Dutch in their revolt. That would mean outright war with Philip II, leading up to the battle with the Spanish Armada. To protect her northern frontier, Elizabeth opened negotiations with James. And she dangled before him the prospect of what so far she had always withheld. When, after the tribunal at which Moray had exhibited the Casket Letters, she had recognized a regent of Scotland, she had not recognized James VI as king. Now she opened the door to this and also did not rule out the further possibility of succession to the English throne, tempting the nineteen-year-old with the prospect of this glittering prize.
James was male, Protestant and available. His flirtation with d’Aubigny and his Jesuit friends had been little more than a teenage crush. He was deeply resentfu
l of the constraints to which he had been subjected by the lords, especially those imposed by Buchanan, his hated tutor. He longed for a throne more powerful than that of Scotland, and with so spectacular a reward as England within his reach, he decided it was not in his interest to think of sharing his dynastic claim with a mother he could not even remember.
In the same month that Elizabeth made her decisive interventions over the Act for the Queen’s Safety, James informed his mother that he would always honor her with the title of Queen Mother. But that was as far as he would ever go. There could be no question of joint sovereignty or her return to Scotland as queen.
To Mary it was the cruelest of blows. She could not believe what she was reading. She fell, in turn, into paroxysms of vomiting, distress and rage. “I pray you to note,” she fulminated as she fought back her tears, “I am your true and only queen. Do not insult me further with this title of Queen Mother . . . There is neither king nor queen in Scotland except me.”
Mary wrote at once to Castelnau demanding that, in his dealings with James, he should not call him king. She threatened to disinherit her son and to curse him if he ignored her and made a separate treaty with England. It touched her most sensitive nerve, destroying everything she had fought for since returning to Scotland from France. “I think,” she said, “no punishment, divine or human, can equal such enormous ingratitude, if he is guilty of it, as to choose rather to possess by force and tyrannically that which justly belongs to me, and to which he cannot have any right but through me.”
And yet, a year later, the treaty with England was signed. James, perhaps without ever fully realizing it, made his mother’s execution at Fotheringhay inevitable. With his signature, he made her irrelevant and disposable. To Mary, who had suffered so many setbacks when her enemies and rivals thought she was in their way, it was the ultimate rejection. She became desperate. The prophecy of the Detection would become self-fulfilling: “Desperate necessity will dare the uttermost,” it had said.
From now on, Mary was prepared to listen to any plot that might offer a chance of escape, however implausible it might seem and however obscure its advocates. And Walsingham was waiting for her. No longer did he need his mole at the French embassy, because Castelnau was effectively blackmailed. To spare him public exposure as an accessory to the Throckmorton plot, he was required to show all letters in his possession to or from Mary to Walsingham. Then, when Paulet succeeded Sir Ralph Sadler as Mary’s keeper and she was returned to the greater security of Tutbury, all her contacts with the outside world were sealed. There was no further need for pretense. Her letters were sent directly to Walsingham to be forwarded. Mary was indignant at this blatant intervention, but to no avail. No longer were any of her letters remotely confidential, because Cecil’s spymaster was reading them openly.
By the time a genuine—if totally unrealistic—conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth was spawned under the leadership of a gullible young man named Babington, Walsingham’s network was complete. His trap was baited and sprung. As he wrote to Leicester, “If the matter be well handled, it will break the neck of all dangerous practices during Her Majesty’s reign.” This time no mistake would be made. They had entered the endgame. The evidence would be obtained by fair means or foul, and Elizabeth compelled to proceed under the Act for the Queen’s Safety. Cecil would be victorious, and Mary sent to the block.
29
Nemesis
MARY FELT she had been torn in pieces when her son, James VI, rejected her to clear the way for his own glittering dynastic prospects. Sir Amyas Paulet, her jailer at Tutbury and Chartley, coolly predicted her reaction. As he cautioned Walsingham, it was “when she was at the lowest [that] her heart was at the greatest, and being prepared for extremity, she would provoke her enemies to do the worst.” Despite her sorely inflamed legs and physical weakness, this was still the same Mary who had ridden in her steel cap at the head of her army during the Chase-about Raid and dealt so ingeniously and courageously with Darnley after the Rizzio plot.
She guessed instantly the reason for Paulet’s severing of her links to the outside world. Walsingham realized that his success in checkmating Castelnau had been all too complete. If he wanted to entrap Mary, then far from sealing off her correspondence, he would have to find her a new postman whom she trusted and believed to be safe. Castelnau could no longer fulfill this role, since he was discredited in both England and France for his collusion in the Throckmorton plot and his aid to Mary over and above his instructions. He was replaced as the French ambassador in September 1585 by Guillaume de l’Aubepine, Baron de Châteauneuf.
Walsingham’s genius as a spymaster lay in his ability to penetrate the networks of his Catholic opponents and turn them to his advantage. He recruited a defecting Catholic refugee, Gilbert Gifford, to establish a monitored channel of communication between Mary and the French embassy. Gifford was a friend of one of Mary’s agents in Paris, who vouched for his credentials. The operation was in place by the end of January 1586, and Walsingham was soon accumulating a fresh pile of intelligence papers, larger and more informative than before. Mary trusted Châteauneuf, whom she believed to be a zealous Catholic of the sort who might help gain her freedom and take seriously the papal decree of 1570 that had declared Elizabeth to be excommunicated and deposed. She wrote candidly to him, blithely unaware that Gifford was working for Walsingham and forwarding her letters to his office for inspection before they were delivered to the embassy.
Mary urged Châteauneuf to look out for “spies” and “moles” among his secretaries. She had also learned her lesson about using alum as a secret ink. It was too easily discovered, she said, “and therefore do not make use of it except in an emergency.” If there was no alternative, she suggested hiding secret messages “in such new books” as she was sent, “writing always on the fourth, eighth, twelfth and sixteenth leaf, and so continuing from four to four . . . and cause green ribbons to be attached to all the books that you’ve had written in this way.”
Mary asked that letters meant for her should be packed, tightly wrapped, in the soles or heels of the fashionable new shoes she still wore and of which she received regular consignments, or else placed between the wooden panels of the trunks and boxes that were used to transport her silks or other goods from London and Paris. At the height of Walsingham’s plan of entrapment, Gifford found himself using a small watertight box that he inserted through the bunghole of a beer cask, where it floated on top of the beer. Paulet was sent by Walsingham to intercept the casks, which were delivered weekly by the brewer. Then, at the crucial moment, Walsingham’s chief decipherer rode to Chartley and slipped incognito into Paulet’s household to read and copy the intercepted documents, after which they were carefully sealed again and returned to their box in the barrel.
Walsingham’s early breakthrough was in March 1586. Mary sent Châteauneuf the key to a new cipher, perhaps her own creation, that she insisted he use for their correspondence, as the old ciphers supplied by Ridolfi and Castelnau were compromised. Once again Walsingham’s chief decipherer did not have to crack the code, which was inadvertently supplied to him, this time by Mary herself. It was just the first of a series of misjudgments that led to her downfall. As Châteauneuf laconically explained in his final report on the debacle to Henry III, “The Queen of Scots and her principal servants placed great confidence in the said Gifford . . . and thence came the ruin of the said queen.” Instead of looking for spies at the French embassy, Mary should have been less trusting when Gifford appeared out of nowhere to offer his services as a postman.
Shortly afterward, a madcap plot took shape. Anthony Babington was a rich young Catholic gentleman who had time on his hands and had served the Earl of Shrewsbury at Sheffield as a page. Now twenty-five, he was married with a young daughter. He became embroiled on the fringes of Catholic conspiracy when he visited France in 1580 to further his education. On his return to England, he ran errands for a number of Catholic priests and missionaries as a fav
or. Above all, he forwarded five packets of confidential letters to Mary before she was transferred from Shrewsbury’s custody to Sadler’s.
Babington’s role as a conspirator might have stopped there, but his connections to Mary’s agents in Paris drew him steadily into an underground cabal after Mendoza was expelled as the Spanish ambassador in London. Mendoza went to live in Paris, and it was from there that he hatched the idea of a coup d’état. Mendoza’s plan aimed to combine a revolt of the English Catholics, a Spanish invasion, Elizabeth’s assassination, and the final liberation and triumph of Mary.
In May and June 1586, Babington first conspired with John Ballard, a soldier-priest and fanatic, Gifford and others. At a meeting at his rooms in London on June 7, it was agreed that Elizabeth should be seized and Mary freed with foreign aid. After some thirteen conspirators had been recruited, many of them more committed to the plot than he was, Babington reluctantly proposed Elizabeth’s assassination by a group of “six gentlemen,” although the names of the six were never settled.
But would Mary approve of the plot? Babington wrote to ask her on July 6. Thanks to Gifford’s role as her postman, the letter was intercepted and Walsingham’s men were alerted. Walsingham knew this was the opportunity he had been waiting for to entrap Mary. The plot was not in itself a “projection”* to frame her; it really existed, but rather than nipping it in the bud, Cecil’s spymaster allowed it to gather momentum so that he could collect the written evidence to put her on trial for her life. Walsingham was involved from start to finish, interviewing Babington no fewer than three times after the plot had developed, but before arresting him, to see if he would be willing to defect and implicate Mary. The plot was highly disorganized—almost entirely a product of fantasy. Babington himself was wracked with doubt, and Walsingham even had to send Gifford to buoy him up when he suddenly panicked and wanted to back out.
